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Conflict will inevitably arise in your organization, as such is the nature of all human interactions. When it does, many family-owned enterprises and small organizations. In order to avoid finding yourself stuck in a situation where you don’t have any options, you need to craft policies and ways of managing conflict beforehand. You also need to genuinely self-reflect and encourage your team to do so as well. Ultimately the best conflict resolution strategies are the ones that manage to get your team back on track. So how do you handle conflict in your organization, no matter what the size? Are there tips you can begin to implement straightaway? As it turns out, there are some that you can use to help with your organizational conflict management.

Evaluate and Understand the Emotional Responses of People

Whenever someone has a strong emotional response to something, they typically fall back to their default setting, which is to seek a fight or flight response. They won’t be able to reason in the heat of the moment and so their actions may not be rational and they may utter words they don’t mean at all and are likely to regret later.

The last thing you want to do in such a situation is to try and argue with such a person. You should wait for the anger or other strong emotion to first dissipate before you can try to communicate with them. Emotionally triggered people aren’t very easy to reason with.

Self-Awareness Is Key

What kind of person are you when a conflict arises? Do you tend to avoid conflict or are you the aggressive type that takes the bull by the horns? It’s important to have a very good understanding of how you deal with conflict. Not everyone will respond especially well to your conflict resolution style. Sometimes you can use your method on the right people and at other times you need to take a step back and either adapt your style to the person and the situation or call in a different person who is better equipped to deal with the situation. Either way, understanding yourself is the first step to understanding others.

Listen to Everyone Involved and Hear Their Views

No one likes to be wrong and so no one ever wants to hear someone else telling them that they are wrong. Of course, you can argue on the one hand that people should be gracious enough to accept that they will not always be right. However, on the other hand, you also cannot expect everyone to be as enlightened about the intricacies of conflict resolution as you.

One of the things that cause conflicts is when one party explicitly tells the other party that they are wrong and the accused party gets defensive. If you feel like this is the situation in your organization then you need to nip it in the bud. Get to hear everyone’s side of the story without judging, and then resolve the issue objectively, with a good understanding of where everyone is coming from.

Solve the Issue From its Roots

Sometimes the conflict you see on the surface isn’t really what’s wrong. Sometimes there is a deeper issue simmering beneath the surface, either on the ground or on the management level. Try to find out what is really going on in a situation and take steps to solve that problem.

Accept People for Everything They Are (and Are Not)

People are different, and so they will retain, interpret, and process information in very different ways. Similarly, they will typically use very different decision-making processes to arrive at their decisions. Knowing how your team members work is very important to knowing how to assign duties to them in such a way that their strengths are useful. You will also be more enlightened and less likely to discount their habits or work styles.

Don’t Forget About Regular Feedback

Conflict typically happens when an issue isn’t addressed while it is still small. It festers like a wound and grows too big and complicated to be solved quickly. To avoid this from happening, you can hold regular meetings where the whole team gives feedback about what is working and what isn’t and brainstorms on what to do going forward. That way, you deal with issues while they are still minor.

Collaborate With the Team to Create Conflict Resolution Protocols

People tend to cooperate with rules when they had a hand in creating the rules. You can ask your team to get together and come up with some conflict resolution protocols that they are buying into. Whatever they come up with, it is likely to work in the long term because everyone had a hand in creating it.

Collaborate With the Team to Create Guidelines for Communication

Not all kinds of communication are helpful or productive in an organization. It could be that much of the conflict in your organization is caused by people communicating in the wrong way. You can, therefore, invite your team to come up with some guidelines for the kinds of communication that are allowed in the workplace. They should be guidelines that everyone buys into, just like the conflict resolution protocols.

You should also be part of this exercise because you might be communicating with your team in the wrong way. Either they find your tone overbearing and dismissive or they find that it discourages them from openly communicating themselves. This may be a cause for much of the conflict in your organization and should, therefore, be dealt with.

Enforce the Measures Adopted by the Team

No one likes to be the disciplinarian that has to reprimand people or resolve conflict. However, you and your team got together and developed some guidelines for how you will communicate with each other and some protocols to resolve conflicts with. These may all be good on paper, but they will never mean anything if they are not implemented.

It is, therefore, your duty to ensure the strategies your team came up with are implemented and to monitor them to make sure they are being followed. If you figure some employees are simply being stubborn, even after there are such clear protocols for dealing with things, then you may need to take disciplinary measures against them to show that you are serious about adopting these protocols.

Ensure That You Have the Right People

One of the most effective ways of managing conflict in an organization is to make sure you have the right person to begin with. Sometimes it’s not about the conflict. Sometimes the issue isn’t the issue; the person is the issue. You may have tried everything you know to deal with conflict and even got the team to come together and contribute ideas to deal with conflict, but find that one or more employees are always at the center of major conflicts. They are either constantly aggrieved or constantly the aggressor.

In such situations, you should evaluate whether the skills of that particular employee would be better suited in a different team or department altogether. Perhaps you should consider giving them a different position within the company.

If you find that they don’t fit anywhere, even when you consider putting them in a different position or team, then you should think about whether that person is the right match for your organization. Losing an employee is an expensive affair for a business and should be the last option. However, sometimes, the benefits of letting an employee go can far outweigh the costs.

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About the Author

Nicole is a business writer with nearly two decades of hands-on and publishing experience. She's been published in several business publications, including The Employment Times, Web Hosting Sun and WOW! Women on Writing. She also studied business in college.

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LaMarco, Nicole. "Ways of Managing Conflict in Organizations." Small Business - Chron.com, http://smallbusiness.chron.com/ways-managing-conflict-organizations-2655.html. 27 November 2018.

LaMarco, Nicole. (2018, November 27). Ways of Managing Conflict in Organizations. Small Business - Chron.com. Retrieved from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/ways-managing-conflict-organizations-2655.html